Experimental Study and Numerical Simulation of Ductile Fracture on In-Situ Tensile Specimens Using GTN Micromechanical Damage Model

The present study is devoted to experimental and numerical investigation of in-situ tensile tests to recognize the mechanisms of ductile fracture under different stress states. The GTN model, which is a micromechanical based damage model, has used for numerical simulations. The parameters related to this model for St12 steel were identified by response surface method (RSM) through minimizing the difference between numerical and experimental results of the tensile test on a standard specimen. The void related parameters of GTN model were determined 0.00107, 0.00716, 0.01, and 0.15 for ff, fc, fN, f0, respectively. After calibrating the damage model for the studied material, the tensile tests were carried out on the in-situ specimens with different geometries. The fractographic analysis was performed to identify the ductile fracture under a wide range of stress states and two failure mechanisms were observed. The calibrated damage model was applied to FE simulations of in-situ tensile specimens for numerical study of the experimentally observed fracture phenomenon. The extracted numerical results showed a good agreement with experimental observations comparing load-displacement plots with a margin of error within 5%. The location of fracture initiation, crack growth orientation, and the displacement at fracture zone in numerical studies also showed close correspondence with experiments.